Posted
by
Zonk
on Monday December 31, 2007 @06:22AM
from the many-hands-make-light-work dept.

The Science Daily site has up a piece on the effect user-generated content can have on map-making. Scientists are appreciative of the data enthusiastic mappers can provide, updating maps on changes in local geographic information. "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information."

I'd say you're rather reckless, but I can't argue with your motivation. You're right, the 'net needs some form of measure to counter link spamming, seeing as how links *are* the Internet and those links are what brings --or diminishes-- its value. And, seeing as how the Internet is all but based on anarchy, your solution is quite appropriate. Let's drown those fsckers.

the thing that really ticked me off is when they stopped using the direct links but started abusing tinyurl and dwarfurl and social engineering to cloak the links, it would be about 20 minutes of coding and testing for the/code guys to fix that (show you the end-target of a redirected link) which would at least stop the social engineering attempts.The biggest problem is it works, check myminicity.com on http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/myminicity.com [alexa.com] alexa. If this is encouraged it won't b

I see no myminicity link. In fact the only myminicity links I see are when I go to your "scremyminicity" website, which asks people to put a 'redirector' in which then links to myminicity, in an effort to "punish" them with traffic.

Reminds of the bit in magic roundabout when dougal is force fed sugar cubes...

In TFA, they are refering to OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], a wiki-style project to create free street maps. (though this is not mentioned in the summary)

I love these guys. I live in Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific country that so far has escaped the attention of the Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft map interfaces. The only way we're going to get decent maps of our towns is by doing it ourselves. Thanks to a few thoughtful people from Australia and the US, we now have a GPS and are mapping all the streets of Port Vila, the capital.

Few people have computer experience, but we managed to recruit a young man from a local NGO's youth project, and he's been spending

Even here in Europe where we do have maps from Google, Microsoft, $you_name_it, an open map does have advantages. First, open data allows you to highlight the map features that are important to you. One of the things that seems to become popular in openstreetmap is generating bicycle maps. Likewise, you can make a map that highlights schools and universities, hiking paths or churches. And you are allowed to publish the maps you make, without getting any written permission or paying royalties.The second impo

The openstreetmap project hasmade quite a lot of progress, For example, they have mapped the entire Isle of man in much more detail than google etc. They have also been donated data to help with the project.

Regarding the map update links, is there any reason to bother submitting new/updated street data? The only benefit is to Nokia and Tom-tom, both large publicly traded companies. Their proprietary datasets costs tens of thousands of dollars to license and you're saving them money in physical mapping costs while getting nothing in return.

It's not like the updates benefit a publicly accessible database like Tiger or Openstreetmap.

I just went for a bike ride and strapped my GPS to the handlebars and set it tracking. When I got back home I cycled round my block a couple of times to get a good track, knowing that the streets aren't in OSM at the moment. I dumped the track to my PC using EasyGPS and added it to OSM using the Java JOSM client, and hit upload.Then I looked at how the rest of my bike ride jived with the existing data. For half my ride I should have been under 20 foot of water in the local river, and for the rest of it it l

You ran into the fundamental weakness in most GPS Systems. The x and y are relatively easy to get. the z is always less accurate.

I used to use a Trimble TDC1 ($12,000 near survey grade GPS) with Realtime differential correction.With 20 points collected on a position and post processing, the x and y were good to about 10 cm yet the Z was usually only good to roughly the nearest meter.

In order to get better results. The GPS antenna needed a large plate attached to act as a shield to block the radio waves f

Ah maybe I wasn't clear. When I said it put me under the river I didn't mean Z-height, just that it had shifted me far enough off the path I was on to think I was in the middle of a 50-metre wide river...Anyhow, if you look at multiple GPS traces on OSM, they look accurate to the metre, whereas my track was all over the place. Is it likely that vehicular GPS units snap their coords to their inbuilt road network? I think OSM are happy that this doesn't constitute a 'derived work' of some copyright maps, but

The european equivalent of WAAS appears to be called 'EGNOS'. Yeah, my GPS doesn't have it. I bought it very shortly after the US switched off the SA thing and I whooped when I realised I'd get 10m resolution!

Would you trust someone to update a map if they can't use the right there?

Yes I do and so do most other map users: they just don't know it.
Ordnance Survey, for example, does not require formal qualifications of a very large fraction of their map editors rather than the ability to edit the map to meet their other cartographic standards, as a dyslexic colleague of mine happily found.
It's inevitable some map editors will be illiterate and also that simple mistakes will be made, as in any other occupation. This is what QA is for:o)

Actually, not everyone can update maps. It does require some training and even still is frequently done incorrectly.I work for an organization that has people going out and mapping and listing houses all over the US. Some do very well. Some do quite poorly. We see things that are obviously wrong even though we're not familiar with the area being worked.

I do agree that formal education (college or whatever) is irrelevant. In our case, the biggest factor is whether or not the person can read a map (there

Of course not everyone can, uh... update maps. I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. Like you said, formal education is uh... irrelevant, like South Africa and uh, such as the Iraq. We need to help our education over here in the U.S. and the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for updating the maps.

I've put together a little bookmarklet that lets you use OSM maps on Google maps and Multimap API implementations (and in fact multimap.com [multimap.com]). In fact I updated it today and have a new blog post about it here [johnmckerrell.com].

It can be really useful when you find a site that has useful data but you want to see that data overlaid on OSM maps. On Multimap's site you can also see routes and lots of other POIs overlaid on the OSM maps too.

TomTom's "MapShare" technology lets users correct maps and generate their own content.
You can actually correct the problems on the TomTom device when you encounter them, so they're applied to your map immediately, and they're uploaded and shared with other users when you hot-sync your TomTom with your PC.
Of course you can also download other user's corrections. You can choose to only use corrections you made yourself, or download corrections verified by TomTom, corrections to POIs you subscribe to, corr

The Confluence Project http://confluence.org/ [confluence.org] is an international effort to perform a systematic sampling of the Earth's surface, i.e. all those locations where both longitude and latitude has integer values.

So far more than 10,000 visitors have documented more than 5,000 of these points.